One of the more effective ways to connect the right prospects for purchase of goods and services online in online advertising is to advertise on sites that attracted a viewership most closely aligned with a target audience. This approach was manually implemented for some time in the early days of online advertising for all types of online advertising, including search, display and video.
Due to the ubiquitous nature of search engines in the online infrastructure the application of contextual advertising is still one of the most popular technique used in online advertising. Placing a contextually relevant advertising in front of a person who enters a search term is still considered the most commercially dominant segment of online advertising. A substantial industry ecosystem has been built around search advertising and the contextualization of media, or web pages. For select websites there is also location and demographic or behavioral attribution associated with the individual visiting a site. However, there currently is no systemic and quantifiable linkage between the search term entry and the person making that entry.
The search segment of the online advertising market is contextually based. The display, video and mobile segments of the ad industry is focused around applications of audience targeting methodologies that increase the relevancy and effective reach to specific users for most online campaigns. Leveraging Data Exchanges, Data Management Platforms and Ad Networks unique users are identified through a behavioral targeting process using browser cookies. Cookies are effectively aggregate into large pools of end users who can be characterized anonymously within ad segments by inferring demographic and behavioral attributes based on the pattern of site visits attributed to each cookie. The inventory of cookie segments are often brokered and resold to third parties to increase scale for the promotion of products and services. With the audience targeting infrastructure of ad networks and exchanges becoming increasingly centralized around data and the pooling of cookies, audiences can be targeted across most publisher web sites completely independent of content on the web pages. There is currently no systemic and quantifiable linkage made between the attributes assigned to a cookie and the media on which the advertising appears.
Centralization of the site and page inventory has helped to bring scale to the industry but did essentially nothing to qualify an audience's interests, or make the cookie based targeting process more transparent to advertisers for display, video, or mobile.
With cookie based audience targeting solutions there is limited relevancy of information between the cookie and the audience, and no quantifiable linkage between the cookie and the context of the page an ad appears on. While much of the display, video and mobile industry remains cookie-based at this time, audience targeting techniques continue to evolve including techniques such as IP Zone Targeting which operates like traditional offline direct marketing in direct mail, television and even email advertising. Techniques like IP Zones connect the IP Address Range of clusters of users to a robust demographic, psychographic and geographic profile of those users. So while IP Zone Targeting serves to successfully link the attributes of an audience to the advertisers product or service, with IP Zone target alone, there currently is no linkage between the IP Zone Audience and the context of the page that ad will appear on.
With the majority of individuals online and the needs of the business community reliant on the Internet, the efficiency of online advertising is increasingly becoming a priority. The objective of online advertising is to identify the appropriate audience for a product or service and place the right message in front of them in a manner that generates the most return on investment.
The challenge the industry faces is finding a systemically effective way to connect the location and the demographic and psychographic profile of each individual online user to the product or service offering in the ad—as well as to the contextual relevance of the site on which the ad appears. A system that combines proven audience targeting based on location and demographic relevance with equally proven contextual target techniques will statistically outperform the online ad performance of either technique individually.
Online Ad Agencies and Media Planners have access to Ad Network trading desks where ads are served and tracked. Ads are tracked in part by the category of sites, and/or the domains, the URL, the time of day, and day of week, on which the ads appear. They track categories where users click on the ad and when it appears on the sites. Agencies and Media Planners manually adjust the weight or frequency of investment in inventory through analysis of A/B testing or other post-process algorithmic means to optimize which select ads appear in a category or site. In essence, Agencies and Media Planners are providing a manual form of contextual relevance to the ad optimization process for display, video and mobile ads that are currently being systemically targeted only by cookie based audiences.
The introduction of technologies like IP Zones Targeting addresses the requirement for a robust linkage between individual users, or audiences, and the location and relevance of the product or service being promoted.
Existing key word search optimization schemes effective address the requirement for a robust linkage between the key word request made by a user and the relevance of web site content on which an online advertisement appears.
Existing methods where Advertising Operations personnel manually optimize contextual relevance of the advertising at the Trading Desk to the audience based on AB testing or other algorithmic results during the course of the campaign.
Thus, it is desirable to combine the IP Zones Targeting audience identification process with an automated system and methods that optimize the linkage of location and a demographically qualified audience to the context and timing of advertising delivery where a qualified audience is brought to a contextual relevant page and to which the ad appears, for all types of online advertising including search, display, video and mobile advertising.